! r e w o P Data Is Racepak has been in the datalogging business almost 40 years. What started off as a personal project to record data on Ron Armstrong’s Unlimited Hydroplane was developed into a state of the art datalogging system that is pretty well used by most drag racers. While road racers and tractor pullers had been covered off by the G2X and G2X Pro units there was never anything that the man on the street saw affordable for use on a road course. That is until now! Racepak has developed a whole new line with a totally different architecture. The CL1 and CL2 use either an iPhone or Android phone as the screen, therefore saving money and it is also cloud based. Now when I heard about it I have to admit to being sceptical. But the more I use it and showcase it to potential customers the more I see there being a place for it. #1 bonus is that it is hugely affordable coming in around $290 US or $400 inc tax here in Ontario, Canada. And where is that place? With the huge increase in track days and HPDE events it is good to be able to quantify if one lap is better than the other and why that was the case. BUT make sure the event to are at allows you to have one on board 94
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in an operational state. Some HPDE events simply do not allow them as it is a comparison against time and their insurance does not allow that. So what do I like about it? The cloud based D3 app allows you to save your data in Racepak’s cloud server for $99 USD a year. That means you can call up a run when you are anywhere in the World and show it to somebody on your phone, tablet or touch based device. Even better is the fact that all team members that are listed on your subscription get texted when the unit is in use and you start running on the track. They than can watch you in real-time on the track map that was generated from Google Earth. Now bear in mind, running wide or missing your apex is now seen by your team-members and you can no longer deny the fact. But as the title of the article says, ‘Data Is Power’ and the more you use the CL Vantage the more you will learn. We will run a series of articles on the Vantage dataloggers to give you the basics of datalogging. There are products out there now that people rave about but I see them as driver coaches not dataloggers. To go further in this sport you need to be able to understand and read graphs. The Racepak Vantage CL1 and CL2 allows you to do that.
